The Politically Incorrect Killing of a Boy on This Day in History

 

This day in history: Jesse Dirkhising was killed on this day in 1999. You never heard of Jesse Dirkhising, but you have heard about Matthew Shepard. Matthew Shepard was a gay man who was killed by two heterosexual men and it made national and international news. Jesse Dirkhising was a 13-year-old boy that was bound drugged, tortured, raped and killed by two gay men, at about the same time, and only the Washington Times picked it up initially on a national level with a headline that read, "Media tune out torture death of Arkansas boy."

NewsMax reported:

“McGowan did a Nexus search and learned that the Shepard case generated a massive 3,007 stories. "And when the case finally went to trial ... it was all over the broadcast news, received front-page coverage in all major newspapers, and was featured on the cover of Time magazine. (In all, the New York Times ran 195 stories about the case.)

"In the month after the Dirkhising murder, however, Nexus recorded only 46 stories...

He sums up by quoting the surprisingly candid Andrew Sullivan - an openly gay columnist for the liberal New Republic.

Wrote Sullivan: "The Shepard case was hyped for political reasons: to build support for inclusion of homosexuals in a federal hate crimes law. The Dirkhising case was ignored for political reasons: squeamishness about reporting a story that could feed anti-gay prejudice and the lack of any pending legislation to hang a story on ... Some deaths - if they affect a politically protected class - are worth more than others. Other deaths, those that do not fit a politically correct profile, are left to oblivion."

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Two Unsolved Political Killings on This Day in History

 

Valerie Percy, 21, daughter of U.S. Senate candidate Charles H. Percy, was murdered in the family mansion in the Chicago suburb of Kenilworth, Illinois on this day in 1966. She had been stabbed to death in her bed. Percy would win election to the Senate in November, but nobody would ever be charged with the murder, and the crime would remain unsolved at the time of his death 45 years later. In 2014, a new book on the murder would identify the late William Thoresen III, who lived with his wealthy family less than two blocks from the Percy home, as the likely suspect. Ironically, Thoresen suffered a fate similar to that of Miss Percy, murdered while lying in his bed.

Also, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, was killed in a plane crash on this day in 1961. New evidence supports a theory that the pioneering U.N. secretary general was assassinated.

"Questions surrounded the crash from the first. For one thing, writes Susan Williams in her 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjold?, the British high commissioner at Ndola, Lord Alport, showed little concern after the U.N. plane failed to land at its scheduled time, instead insisting that Hammarskjold had decided to go elsewhere. Then there was the fact that search for the plane’s wreckage and crash site didn’t begin for hours after the crash, though witnesses had reported seeing a great flash in the sky soon after midnight. 

Local residents in the area had seen a second plane in the sky that night, but their testimony was discounted or ignored by colonial authorities, the Guardian reported in 2011. The crash’s sole survivor, U.N. security officer Harold Julien, also spoke before he died of an explosion on board the plane, but the authorities assumed he was too ill and sedated to be taken seriously.

Two days after Hammarskjold's death, former U.S. President Harry Truman insinuated to reporters that the U.N. leader had been assassinated, saying he 'was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said _when they killed him._'" Source

There is also evidence suggesting the plane was shot down. A CIA report claimed the KGB was responsible.

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An Unsolved Killing of a UNC Chapel Hill Student on This Day in History

 

This day in history: The body of Faith Hedgepeth, an undergraduate student in her third year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), was found in her apartment by a friend on this day in 2012. She had been beaten over the head with a blunt instrument, later found to be an empty liquor bottle, and evidence of semen and male DNA was present at the crime scene. The last time she was known for certain to be alive was much earlier that morning, when she went to bed after returning from a local nightclub with her roommate.

Police have recovered considerable forensic evidence in the case, but so far it has served to eliminate one likely suspect, a former boyfriend of her roommate who reportedly expressed anger and resentment toward Hedgepeth, even supposedly threatening to kill her if he could not reunite with her roommate. His DNA, however, did not match that left at the scene. A note left at the scene, suggesting the writer was jealous, is also believed to have been written by the killer; it was among a large group of documents released by police two years after the crime, following a court action brought by several local media outlets.

Four years after the killing, a Virginia DNA testing company prepared and released, at police's behest, an image showing what the suspect might look like based on his genetic phenotype. A voicemail possibly accidentally recorded by Hedgepeth may also capture some of the events that led to her death.

On September 16, 2021, the Chapel Hill Police Department arrested Miguel Salguero-Olivares, 28, of Durham, on a first-degree murder charge in Hedgepeth's death. He had not been a suspect originally, but was identified through DNA samples after he had been arrested on a drunken-driving charge in Wake County the preceding month. According to court documents released in January 2022, the DNA found at the scene and the palm print on the murder weapon match Salguero-Olivares. In a statement, the police asked the public to bear with them as they sorted the details out. "This story will take time to completely unfold", said Chief Blue.

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